ROBOT STORIES

Robot Stories offers a package of four cautionary tales about how robots and technology will impact the future. Though mildly involving, the feature film suffers from having too few distinctions among its different parts.

"My Robot Baby" concerns a couple, Marcia and Roy (Tamlyn Tomita and James Saito), who visit an adoption agency in an effort to find a child to raise. Instead of a human baby, the doctors give the couple a robot baby to care for, as a way to find out what kind of parents Marcia and Roy would be over a trial period.

At first, Marcia and Roy enjoy the parent-training experience, but later become exasperated with the malfunctioning little robot. After Roy leaves on business, Marcia is left alone with the toy baby and even more problems result.

"The Robot Fixer" focuses on a mother whose son is dying in a hospital bed. The angry and depressed mother discovers the only way she can reach her comatose son is to repair his boyhood toy robot collection.

"Machine Love" follows two androids who are programmed to do nothing but work. They learn about being human from their co-workers, who only make fun of them, but eventually Archie (Greg Pak) and Lydia (Julienne Hanzelka Kim) fall in love with each other, which befuddles everyone.

Finally, "Clay" tells the story of John Lee (Sab Shimono), an elderly sculptor who is supposed to achieve immortality by having his brain scanned so his consciousness will be added to the global network.

Writer-director-producer Greg Pak shows more creativity with his ideas than with his approach; he invents four distinct short stories, but films them in all-too-similar ways. The tone, pacing, acting styles, design, et al. are so alike in all four sections they detract from the interesting, imaginative, even poignant themes and ideas. This problem extends to the casting (without any discernable reason) of mostly Asian-Americans. Perhaps Pak should have taken a page from Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask), which used unique styles for each of its vignettes. For example, "Robot Baby" could have paid homage to the famous voodoo-doll episode in Trilogy of Terror, while "The Robot Fixer" could have been pure Douglas Sirk melodrama. Alternately, Pak could have allowed other directors to film at least three of the stories.

Oh, well. Each segment would be much stronger without the omnibus wrapping, so try to pick one, then don't watch the others.